The nature of my job is that I often listen to people tell me their life story while I’m replacing their kitchen faucet. It’s not that I can’t do small talk - I just find most of the topics incredibly uninteresting. Like I said earlier, I know how to play the game, I just find it mind-numbingly boring.
This goes both ways, though. I’m acutely aware that most people aren’t interested in the things I’m most passionate about, so I don’t bring those up either. But when I do meet someone with similar interests, I could talk for hours. Those conversations are rarely about people or events - mostly about ideas.
Snowman@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Before you even mentioned autism I was thinking “I wonder if they might be autistic”, so with that in mind you may want to look up the double empathy problem. Basically, multiple studies have shown that autistic people find it easier to empathise with other autistic people and harder to empathise with allistic (non-autistic) people, whilst the exact opposite is true for allistic people. Importantly, contrary to what many previously believed, there is no difference in the overall level of empathy, it’s more a matter of compatibility.
The point being, that the people in this thread who have implied that you lack empathy are probably wrong, and your above comment would seem to agree with this.